Who are the believers of the Old Testament?

Answer 1

The Hebrew peoples, the great grandchildren of Abraham, and children of Jacob called Israel - the 12 tribes of Israel of which Joseph's 2 sons, Ephraim and Manasseh became equal inheritors as Israel took them as his own before he gave his blessings to each of the tribes and passed on.

Answer 2

The Israelites are God's chosen people. Deut. 7:6: "For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession."

These are some of the factors involved in God's selection of Israel.

• His instructions to mankind, as a whole, had been challenged by a united rebellion of the people against Him at Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), and He then forcibly confounded their languages and divided them into distinct nations.
  
  
• His promise of a coming Redeemer to reconcile a lost world to Himself required that God should become man some day and He would thus have to be born into a particular nation and people.
  
  Such a nation would have to be prepared, both by divine revelation and national experience, to be the nation through which the Savior would come.
  
  
• All of the nations formed as a result of the judgment at Babel were already in rebellion against God and unsuitable for this purpose.
  
  
• God, therefore, chose one man, Abraham, to establish a new nation through which "all families of the earth would be blessed."

In addition to the people of Israel being special and God's chosen, the land is special also. In Deuteronomy 11:12, we read, "It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end."

Sources:

www.allabouttruth.org (God's chosen people)

Answer 3

Primarily the Old Testament is about the Jewish people. In the first book in the O.T. we have the creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, and Abraham among others, but it was Abraham who was first called a Hebrew. God's promises to the Jewish people was first given to Abraham as the founding father of the Jewish people. All of the books of the Old Testament were written by Jewish authors.

Answer 4

The "central characters" are the Israelites, a.k.a. the Jews.

Answer 5

The Tanakh (Jewish Bible) has as its focus the Israelites.

Answer 6

Jews believe in the Old Testament exclusively. Christians believe in the Old Testament along with the New Testament.

Answer 7

Abraham, his son Isaac, and grandson Jacob were Hebrews. Jacob took or was given the name Israel, and his descendants called themselves the Children of Israel or Israelites. They were still Hebrews. One of the tribes of Israel, the Judaites, was descended from Jacob's son Judah. The kingdom of Judah was the last surviving Israelite kingdom, and the survivors of that kingdom, regardless of their tribal affiliation, were known as Judaites or Jews, the English word that comes through Latin and Greek from the Hebrew word for the Judaites. Jews still call themselves Israelites, Children of Israel, and sometimes even Hebrews.